Category Archives: Political philosophy

THE GOVERNMENT DIDN’T BUILD THAT

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lTAT0dZMRw&feature=related

It’s 5 o’clock in the morning.  No one but the night critters are out.  It’s peaceful and I have been thinking, thinking about the Golden Gate Bridge.  The government didn’t build that, we did.  The government didn’t even conceive it.  In 1916 a privately owned newspaper, The San Francisco Daily Call published an article proposing the bridge.  A private a private structural engineer by the name of Joseph Strauss offered to build it for 30 million dollars.  The government wasn’t interested.  Five years later Strauss said it could be done for 27 million dollars.  It took eight more years after that for the government to approve it.  And then another 4 years of bureaucratic bickering passed before government authorities allowed the first pick to hit the ground.  The bridge wasn’t built by the government; it was built despite the government.

Irving Morrow and Leon Moisseiff did the designing.  They were private architects.  A private construction firm did the hands on building of the bridge.  The government doled out the money to pay for it but it was money they only had by taxing it away from the private sector.  The government doesn’t pay tax.  The government didn’t pay for it, the private sector did.  There is however one thing for which the government deserves all the credit, that’s the ribbon cutting ceremony.

Shall I tell you about the Hoover Damn or the street in front of your house?  It’s the same story.  If it hadn’t been for your money they wouldn’t exist.  If it hadn’t been for private sector enterprises to do the work the roads would still be unpaved.  We have the enterprising ingenuity of individuals working outside of the government mostly to thank for the beauty of our bridges and roads.  Hear me Mr. Obama, today’s entrepreneurs built their businesses just as surely as Thomas Edison invented the light bulb.  Or do you think the government did that too?

MY 2 CENTS ON “YOU DIDN’T BUILD THAT”

 

“People know that vast personal incomes come not only through the effort or ability or luck of those who receive them, but also because of the opportunities for advantage which Government itself contributes.  Therefore, the duty rests upon the Government to restrict such incomes by very high taxes.”

Who said that?  It was not our current president.  Here’s a clue – It was the only President in our history who presided over an even longer economic recovery than Barack Obama.  It was Franklin Delano Roosevelt in an address to Congress in 1935.  It is no coincidence that the economic policies of both presidents failed.  Minds that think alike produce results that look alike.  Roosevelt ordered thousands of young pigs to be destroyed to raise the price of pork – in a depression!  Obama ordered thousands of serviceable cars destroyed which raised the cost of transportation for lower income families — in a recession.

As the opening quote attests, Roosevelt sought to siphon money from the employer class to pay for federal government programs.  Obama seeks to do the same.  Roosevelt’s plan for recovery was to put people to work on the taxpayer’s payroll, not in the private sector.  See the CCC and WPA.  Obama’s plan is to rebuild roads and bridges (WPA) and subsidize unprofitable environmental programs like the Solyndra (CCC).

Roosevelt took measures later declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.  See The Schechter Brothers and the NRA (National Industrial Recovery Act).  Obama has also been at odds with the Supreme Court.  Both presidents felt restrained by the Court, as well they should.  The Court is there to protect the people from an overreaching government.  Both presidents sought powers beyond those stipulated by our founders, albeit for different reasons.

When two presidents think so much alike and manage economic recoveries with results that are so much alike, it’s not coincidence.  It’s because their policies don’t work.  And what are those different reasons?  Roosevelt’s goal was to restore the economy and benefit lower income workers.  He just didn’t know how to do it.  Obama’s goal is to put a choker on capitalism and completely transform America.  He knows what he is doing.  It’s up to the voters not to let him do it.

 

THE JEWISH VOTE

In the old South and the KKK days, blacks in the North who began to vote, voted mostly Republican.  They didn’t vote much in the South because the Democrats imposed a “poll tax” that was too burdensome for blacks to pay.  It was the creation of dependency status that turned the black vote in favor of the Democratic Party.  It was FDR more than anyone else who was responsible for turning that vote.

The Jewish vote and funding has gone primarily to Democrats from the start.  Could it be that Obama will be responsible for changing that metric?  Again from today’s NYT  “the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, is starting a new effort in battleground states to win over Jewish voters.”  And has been noted many places, contributions from Jewish sources for Obama are falling far short of traditional levels.

Obama’s negative attitude toward Israel has not gone unnoticed.  Neither has his non-critical acceptance of the Muslim Brotherhood as the Egyptian winners in Egypt.  The Jewish community’s century-long nexus with the Democratic Party is dramatically eroding under this President.  There is no more Jewish populated voting district in America than the 9th District of New York.  In the 2010 election the district elected a Republican Congressman for the first time in 88 years.

It will be interesting to see if the voting follows the same path as the funding.  I believe it will.

GOVERNMENT-ONLY HEALTHCARE

As bad as Obamacare appears to be, it is even worse than it seems.  Passage of the Affordable Care Act was not the completion of a plan, it was the first step, a Trojan horse.  Read what Rick Unger had to say in Forbes on Dec 2, 2011.  Mr. Unger is not a Tea Party activist lamenting the coming end of patient controlled health care and Obama’s false promise of Choice.  Unger is a firm supporter of Obamacare.  He is not lamenting the end of private health care insurance; he is confirming and applauding it.

This is the true ‘bomb’ contained in Obamacare and the one item that will have more impact on the future of how medical care is paid for in this country than anything we’ve seen in quite some time.  Indeed, it is this aspect of the law that represents the true ‘death panel’ found in Obamacare—but not one that is going to lead to the death of American consumers. Rather, the medical loss ratio will, ultimately, lead to the death of large parts of the private, for-profit health insurance industry.

Why? Because there is absolutely no way for-profit health insurers are going to be able to learn how to get by and still make a profit while being forced to spend at least 80 percent of their receipts providing their customers with the coverage for which they paid.

In other words, the new law caps insurance company gross profit from insurance operations at 20%.  What a company manages to net out of that is up to them.  Unger acknowledges that it may not be enough to survive and he cries halleluiah to that!  The end of private insurance.

Today, [Dec 2, 2011] the Department of Health & Human Services issues the rules of what insurer expenditures will—and will not—qualify as a medical expense for purposes of meeting the requirement.

Not a chance-and they know it. Indeed, we are already seeing the parent companies who own these insurance operations fleeing into other types of investments. They know what we should all know – we are now on an inescapable path to a single-payer system for most Americans and thank goodness for it.

Note that it is the Department of Health & Human Services that sets the rules.  That means HHS can change the rules if their objective is not being met.  An act of Congress is not required.  SOTUS says Obamacare is a tax.  Taxation without representation, anyone?

If you thought that the Obama Administration chickened out on pushing the nation in the direction of universal health care for everyone, today is the day you begin to understand that the reality is quite the contrary. ~ Unger

As you heard Barney Frank and Barack Obama say in the video, single payer (government only) coverage is the ultimate goal.  As you will learn if you follow our upcoming coverage of the book Radical-In-Chief, the progressive’s strategy is incremental stealth.  If single payer is the goal, debate over percentages is pointless.  No private enterprise that needs a profit to survive can compete with a government that doesn’t.

The only way to stop government-only health care is to stop Barack Obama.  Come November, don’t let you vote go to waste.

NORTH DAKOTA MULLS ELIMINATION OF PRIVATE PROPERTY TAX

A man’s home is his castle, right?  Not exactly.  Once the mortgage is paid a man has the comfort of knowing it’s his for life, right?  Not exactly.  The government cannot take a man’s homestead away except as necessary to build a highway, a bridge or some other project for the benefit of all, certainly not to turn it over to another private party, right?  Not exactly.

A real King could do what he liked in his castle.  A man today can do only what the government permits.  The permission process can be long, costly and still end up in being denied.  Your mother may have to go to the nursing home if the town won’t allow the changes needed to accommodate her living with you.

You can pay off the mortgage for life.  The bank will never come back and say “We decided we want some more money from you.  We are running a little short.”  But the government will.  It’s called property tax.  You can never pay it off and you can never stop the collector from deciding to take a little more if they are running short.

You have heard of the law of eminent domain.  Let’s go to the dictionary.  Eminent – prominent, of higher standing.  Domain – a territory over which rule or control is exercised.  The government has final rights to your castle, not you.  The US Supreme court in the Kelo decision allowed the taking of a home from a taxpayer in Connecticut enabling a developer to bulldoze the house and build something that would yield higher property tax revenue.

You worked all your life, you scraped and you saved, you did everything right.  You achieved the dream, the home is yours.  Now it is the autumn of your life.  You have earned the comfort of knowing that whatever happens, your home is yours for life.  Not exactly.  If misfortune strikes and you can’t pay the rent they call property tax, it’s bye, bye castle.

Oh, I know, many municipalities have laws and practices that allow you to stay in your own home until you die.  But there is something disquieting about the fact that you are living at the mercy of a government in what has become their home by default.

The people of North Dakota have decided to do something about it.

“I would like to be able to know that my home, no matter what happens to my income or my life, is not going to be taken away from me because I can’t pay a tax,” said Susan Beehler, one in a group of North Dakotans who have pressed for an amendment to the state’s Constitution to end the property tax. They argue that the tax is unpredictable, inconsistent, counter to the concept of property ownership.

The proposition comes to a vote on Tuesday.  It isn’t practical enough to pass, but it’s a nice idea.

BARACK OBAMA AND FRANCE, LIKE TWO BULLIES IN A SANDBOX

You hit me first!!  No I didn’t.  YOU hit ME first!!

While Obama blames today’s American unemployment on France and Europe, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius threw it back at Barack Obama saying the threat of the European debt crisis originated in the United States.  “Lehman Brothers was not a European bank” Fabius said.

The PIGS, Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain not to mention France and Great Britain have been spending at unsustainable rates ever since they recovered from World War II and now it’s our fault that they ran out of money.  Here at home, our own government set up a house-of-cards in the mortgage market that inevitability had to fail like a Ponzi scheme. When it did, we chose a socialist to solve the problem and he blames France.

The Brits have Monty Python; we have Washington.

A COUPLE OF THINGS YOU PROBABLY DIDN’T KNOW

Let the New York Times increase your knowledge, at least on these 3 things.  Ignore my comments.  I never even went to college.

1. Republicans must be as pleased as Punch with Obama’s economic program.  The President is following economic policies Republicans consider ideal and have always dreamed they could put in place.

What should be done about the economy? Republicans claim to have the answer: slash spending and cut taxes. What they hope voters won’t notice is that that’s precisely the policy we’ve been following the past couple of years. Never mind the Democrat in the White House; for all practical purposes, this is already the economic policy of Republican dreams. ~ Paul Krugman

And all the time I thought the Republicans were saying cut the strangling over-regulation, stop stifling oil and coal production, stop passing vague laws for your czars to enforce as they see fit, stop threatening to increase the tax burden when things are already slow and stop attacking success.  In other words, just get out of the way.

2. Obama is slashing spending at a rate not seen since the end of the Korean War.

Look first at total government spending — federal, state and local. Adjusted for population growth and inflation, such spending has recently been falling at a rate not seen since the demobilization that followed the Korean War. ~ Paul Krugman

Mr. Krugman provides this link, Mr. Obama a big spender to a couple of charts that he portends prove his point.  The charts do show a sharp decline in the last 12 months, but the charts are not a picture of spending at all.  They are a convoluted measure of growth rates.  To illustrate – If you spend 100% more this year than last, and then 50% more next year than this, and 30% more on top of that in the third year, then the lines on Krugman’s charts would show a dramatic decline while you were actually spending more and more each year.

3. With Barack Obama as President, U.S. borrowing costs are lower than they ever were before in the history of the country.

Well, U.S. borrowing costs have just hit a record low. ~ Paul Krugman

Wags have often said “You can’t make this stuff up”.  Paul Krugman can.  Perhaps that’s why he won a Nobel Prize.

THE NEW YORK TIMES, MSNBC, DAN RATHER, KEITH OLBERMANN AND THE LOT

It is easy for conservatives to fall into a gloom and doom trap.  Patriotism, Christianity and even capitalism are openly and widely ridiculed and rebuked.  We see nations in Europe falling into insolvency brought on by unsustainable spending rates with the United States following suit.  We are a democracy and have chosen a man to lead us who doesn’t believe in us.  Mom, apple pie and the flag are no longer sacrosanct.

Are we really doomed?  Is decline inevitable?  Is the light shining on a hill going out?  Sometimes the signs of hope lie in the signs of failure.

Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations argued that the collective wisdom of large masses of people over time far surpasses the intelligence of a few elites, no matter how astute the few may be.  In a free market society markets follow the collected wisdom of the people.  You buy the car you think is best.  You buy the clothes you like.  You shop at the stores that carry the goods you need at prices that represent fair value to you.  Those who offer real value succeed, those who don’t, fail.

It is no different with the media.  Whether it is time or money you are spending, you spend it where there is value.  The New York Times is failing fast.  The Times is selling assets left and right just to stay afloat.  The newspaper industry is a troubled one but given its history and prestige the Times should not be in the trouble it is.  But their content has become shoddy and biased beyond all reason.  John Hinderaker at the Power Line blog says “The Times is the newspaper equivalent of MSNBC.”  I have had the same thought myself.  MSNBC has but a fraction of the audience of FOX.  The people are free to choose.  As long as a majority see little value in the tripe put out by outlets selling the ideology of the uncompromising left, their failure is a sign of hope.

But I don’t wish them failure.  I wish them wisdom.

RULES for RADICALS by SAUL ALINSKY – THE GENESIS OF TACTIC PROXY

Continuing with the chapter by chapter series on Rules for Radicals, today we add Comments about the chapter called The Genesis of Tactic Proxy.

Synopsis of the chapter entitled The Genesis of Tactic Proxy
“America’s corporations are a spiritual slum, and their arrogance is the major threat to our future as a free society.”

The title of this chapter is derived from the idea of using corporate shareholder proxies to achieve your own goals.  Corporate stockholders have certain rights as to how the corporation conducts its affairs.  These rights are exercised by voting and the voting document is called a proxy. The tactic involves persuading colleges, foundations and churches to vote their proxies in solidarity according to the organizer’s plan of attack.

Alinsky stumbled upon this idea when talking to three business administration college students who were opposed to the Vietnam war, but “recoiled from such actions as carrying the Viet Cong flag or burning their draft cards.  However, they did believe in using proxies.”

The genesis of the proxy tactic is an example of why an organizer should hang loose. When a door opens unexpectedly, go through it. Be not concerned that it takes you off the path you had planned. Do not fall into the trap set by “our alleged educational system” that teaches “order, logic, rational thought, direction and purpose”. These ideas are invalid because they are too rigid. The organizer must be ready to go where the flow leads him.

Commentary
The author’s statement at the top of this awkwardly named chapter only needs minor editing to be correct.  “America’s corporations Democratic leaders are a spiritual slum, and their Obama’s arrogance is the major threat to our future as a free society.”

Saul Alinsky must have been quite proud of himself when he stumbled on this idea.  Here he was, using capitalist corporate procedures to promote a Marxist cause.  He didn’t realize it was never destined to work.  Not many corporate shareholders are going to join in solidarity with any radical causes, let alone socialist ones.

SCHUMER ATTACKS FACEBOOK CO-FOUNDER. WANTS A BIGGER PIECE OF SAVERIN’S MONEY TO GO TO THE GOVERNMENT

Eduardo Saverin was born in Brazil and lives in Singapore which is his legal residence.  He applied for American citizenship and attended college in the United States where he met Mark Zuckerberg, and by some accounts was the prime techy in the structure of Facebook.

Saverin stands to get a big pot of money when Facebook finally becomes a public company and he will pay U.S. taxes on his gain when he sells the stock.  But all the tax that is legally due, and that’s about 600 million dollars, is not enough to satisfy the Democrats led by Chuck Schumer.  They plan to introduce a bill to double that.

It doesn’t end there. The Democrats also want to bar the man from  re-entering the U.S.  Way to go Democrats, an enterprising young man manages to create an additional 600 million dollars for the U.S. treasury and you want to pass a law preventing him or anyone else from coming back and doing it something like that again.  You are driving America from the land of opportunity to becoming the land to avoid for anyone with enterprising ingenuity. Yuk!